Category: Creativity

Do you like surprises? If you do, it may surprise you to learn that a lot of other people don’t.

Our natural ability (or lack thereof) to deal with surprising situations and the uncertainty they generate may have an important role to play in our creativity.

Psychologists call our natural way of dealing with uncertainty ‘personal need for structure’. Some people have a greater desire to know what is coming next, what to expect; whereas other people don’t mind being surprised.

Take a couple of social situations as examples. Imagine you go to a restaurant with your partner, where you are met by the maitre d’ and sat down, brought your menus, given the wine list and so on.

Throughout the evening the social structure of the situation is just like every other time you’ve visited a restaurant. The rituals of ordering food and drink; the pretending to ignore other diners, but secretly checking them out; then, when the bill arrives, briefly considering doing a runner before laying down the plastic.

The rituals are comforting.

But let’s imagine we mess with this situation. Say you walk into the restaurant and there’s no maitre d’, you sit down wherever you can fit in. Then you are brought random foods and drinks that you didn’t choose and the people sitting next to you don’t ignore you, but start up conversations like you were old friends. Not only that but the waiters also sits down to eat their meals with you.

And it turns out the whole things is free, sort of: apparently everyone is coming around to your place next Saturday and expects the same treatment.

What kind of a weird restaurant has this system? Well, it’s just the rules of a dinner party transported to a restaurant, but because the rules are out of place they are surprising.

The point is that those with a high personal need for structure would find the dinner-party-style restaurant highly uncomfortable. You don’t know what to expect because the rules have all been changed and no one told you. Other people, though, don’t mind these sorts of things so much: they are more likely to take it in their stride.

The good news for those who like surprises is that psychologists have found that they are generally more creative. Something about this ability to roll with the uncertainty inherent in some situations seems to make people’s minds more open to new possibilities. It seems uncertainty breeds creativity.

A recent study, though, has added an important nuance and gives creative hope to those of us who don’t like surprises.

In their study Rietzschel et al. (2010) tested both people’s need for structure and their fear of being wrong. They thought that both would have an effect on creative performance. Participants were given a series of tests of creativity which included being asked to draw an alien. Those aliens which looked least like a mammal were judged most creative.

The researchers found that when participants weren’t afraid of being wrong then their need for structure didn’t stop them being creative. The problems came when people’s anxieties destroyed their ability to be creative.

Those of us who need structure can still be highly creative as long as we don’t allow our fears to get the better of us. The key is to find ways to reduce the fear of being wrong and give ourselves time to discover all the possibilities our minds have to offer.

Image credit: Patrick Hoesly

The idea of creativity is wonderful: that a spark of inspiration can eventually bring something new and useful into the world, perhaps even something beautiful. Something, as it were, from nothing.

That spark may only be the start of a journey towards the finished article or idea, but it is still a wonderful moment. Without the initial spark there will be no journey. It’s no exaggeration to say that our ability to be creative sits at the heart of our achievements as a species.

Do incentives work?

So, what methods do people naturally use to encourage creativity? In the creative industries the usual method is money, or some other related incentive. So, can incentives encourage people to be creative?

According to the research, they can, but crucially these incentives need to emphasise that creativity is the goal (Eisenberger & Shanock, 2003). Studies find that if people are given an incentive for just completing a task, it doesn’t increase their creativity (Amabile et al., 1986). In fact, incentives linked to task completion (rather than creativity) can reduce creativity.

Another way of encouraging creativity is simply to be reminded that creativity is a goal. It seems too simple to be true, but research has found that just telling people to ‘be creative’ increases their creativity (e.g. Chen et al., 2005).

The theory is that this works because people often don’t realise they’re supposed to be looking for creative solutions. This is just as true in the real world as it is in psychology experiments. We get so wrapped up in deadlines, clients, costs and all the rest that it’s easy to forget to search for creative solutions.

People need to be told that creativity is a goal. Unlike children, adults need to be reminded about the importance of creativity. Perhaps it’s because so much of everyday life encourages conformity and repeating the same things you did before. Doing something different needs a special effort.

Rational versus intuitive thinking

However telling someone to ‘be creative’ is a bit like telling them to ‘be more clever’ or ‘be more observant’. We want to shout: “Yes, but how?!”

Another insight comes from a new study on stimulating creativity. This suggests one solution may lie in using an unusual thinking style—unusual, that is, to you (Dane et al., 2011). Let me explain…

When trying to solve problems that need creative solutions, broadly people have been found to approach them in one of two ways:

1. Rationally: by using systematic patterns of thought. This involves relying on specific things you’ve learnt in the past, thinking concretely and ignoring gut instincts.
2. Intuitively: by setting the mind free to explore associations. This involves working completely on first impressions and whatever comes to mind while ignoring what you’ve learnt in the past.

The researchers wondered if people’s creativity could be increased by encouraging them to use the pattern of thinking that was most unusual to them. So, those people who naturally preferred to approach creative problems rationally, were asked to think intuitively. And the intuitive group was asked to think rationally for a change.

Participants were given a real-world problem to solve: helping a local business expand. The results were evaluated by managers from the company involved. When they looked at the results, the manipulation had worked: people were more creative when they used the thinking style that was most unusual for them.

One of the reasons this may work is that consciously adopting a different strategy stops your mind going down the same well-travelled paths. We all have habitual ways of approaching problems and while habits are sometimes useful, they can also produce the same results over and over again.

A limitation of this study is that it only looked at the generation of new ideas. This tends to occur mostly at the start of the creative process. So once ideas have been generated and a more analytical mindset is required, these techniques may not work so well.

Image credit: gfpeck